Patient-Professional Communication Plug-in (PPCP)

The PPCP offers a commercially sustainable and comprehensive solution for developing and using everyday language in written as well as spoken patient-professional digital communication design – so that they can focus on living instead of being ill.

Project

P 14071 - Patient-Professional Communication Plug-in (PPCP)

Time

From
01/01/2015

To
31/12/2017

Today, patients in many locations have the opportunity to access their medical records online. The main purpose to providing this information is to promote participation in the care of oneself. A plus is that it also reduces the time a physician must spend on simple information sharing, freeing up time to focus on more specialised skills. One problem, however, is that understanding the medical jargon in records can be a challenge, even for professional caregivers.

The PPCP project set out to ease the risk of miscommunication. The resulting development will be an application that ‘translates’ – or rather explains – the difficult words of a medical record into the plain language of choice, including colloquial Northern Sami, Arabic, Somali, and Tigrinya. This is done in a web interface showing an individual’s medical record. By clicking a difficult term, an explanation will appear.

The application will permit patient versions of any type of medical information – regardless of specialty and language - although the current pilot is focused on records related to ‘heart attack’ in the five Nordic languages and English. The interface will be accessible in all types of electronic media, especially mobile devices. The project is still looking for reference group members who are passionate about improving digital communications between professionals and patients, particularly in the heart field.

Goals

To develop a plugin that links multilingual professional and non-professional language.

To showcase how the plugin works when a heart attack patient wants to understand his or her medical record.

Planned activities

Develop an easy-to use plugin.

Collect multilingual terminology for the pilot focus area (heart attack).

Test the function of the plugin on actual care recipients to ensure relevance and worth.